


143. red as blood

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [90]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:15:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: The bottles of hair dye on the counter contain most colors of the rainbow, if not all of them. Helena is staring at them and gnawing contemplatively on the skin by her thumbnail. She looks panicked.





	

Sarah walks into the bathroom and sees:

  * • Helena
  * • Six bottles of hair dye on the counter



They’re most colors of the rainbow, if not all of them. Helena is staring at them and gnawing contemplatively on the skin by her thumbnail. She looks panicked.

“Hey,” Sarah says, and Helena _jumps_ , flails wildly with her hands for a minute, settles.

“Hey,” she says delicately, like she’s trying to mimic the sound of the word _exactly_ from where it had fallen out of Sarah’s mouth. She folds her arms across her chest, hands shoved into her elbows. “Hello, _sestra_. How are you.”

“You dyin’ your hair?” Sarah says without preamble.

“I don’t know,” Helena says. “Maybe. Why do you want to know?” Her gaze leaves Sarah’s, skitters off into the distance somewhere.

“Just curious,” Sarah says, stepping further inside the bathroom with careful slow steps – like she’s trying not to frighten an animal. Helena’s hair is strange: the roots never grow out, but Sarah’s never seen her dyeing it. She can’t really picture Helena any other way than blonde, bedraggled, brown at the heart of her. One of the bottles is labeled COOL SLIME GREEN! and Sarah just can’t see it.

Helena unfolds her arms and walks her fingers across the tops of all the bottles. COOL SLIME GREEN! and ELECTRIC SHOCK BLUE! and BLOOD RED!, which makes Sarah think of Katja and wince. Might as well be HEADSHOT RED!, really. Helena’s hand settles over the top of that one, the gesture somehow loving.

“I’m not – an angel,” she says quietly. “Anymore. I don’t want to – I don’t want to—” she shrugs, an awkward lopsided motion. “I don’t know.”

“You thought about lettin’ it grow out?” Sarah says, grabbing SCREAM QUEEN PURPLE! and tossing it back and forth between her hands. The woman on the label keeps her same purple smirk, even as she’s jolted wildly around.

Helena shakes her head slowly. She toggles the cap on the bottle of red dye. On, off, on, off.

“You’ll fit in,” Sarah says, and she means it as a joke but when it leaves her mouth she realizes she’s not quite sure she does. It hangs in the air between them, awkward and limp.

“I don’t,” Helena says, the words leaving her mouth like – well, Sarah just wishes she would take her hand off HEADSHOT RED! and grab a different bottle. Helena starts opening and closing the cap faster, though, words firing out of her mouth, Sarah’s sister an emotional machine gun. “I don’t – fit. Everyone should know. When they see me. That I don’t fit, with you, or _sestra_ Cosima, or _sestra_ Alison, or any of the others, I’m different, I’m…” she sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Gemma wrote a paper, for her science class, about frogs that are bright colors so that you do not eat. I should be bright colors. So that you do not eat.”

The speech is done. Helena doesn’t look at Sarah. Sarah doesn’t know what to say; it would all be a lie, and the worst part is Helena would want so terribly to believe it. “You fit,” she says awkwardly. “You’re family.”

“If I fit,” Helena says viciously, “I would have a place, and I would stay there.” She clicks the cap back on the bottle and takes her hand away. “But instead…I am laundry bags. Always dirty bags of the laundry, from _sestra_ to _sestra_.”

“Maybe,” she says, “I don’t want to be laundry anymore.” She grabs COOL SLIME GREEN! and squirts a little into her palm and smirks at Sarah, sideways and almost cruel. Her palm is going to be stained an artificial kelly green for days, and she looks like she knows.

“So,” she says, “are you going to help? Or are you going to close the door?”

Sarah thinks: _you’re my family_. Sarah thinks: _we love you so much, you have to know that_. Sarah thinks: _we all want you to stay with us_. Sarah lies to herself, just to pretend it’ll make her feel better. Then she steps forward, and takes the bottle of dye out of Helena’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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